Flash-on-Mobile: Re-Examining the Controversy

While it’s been a low-level grumbling for years, the issue of Flash on mobile devices (and particularly the iPhone/Touch/iPad ecosystem) has reached fever pitch over the past few weeks, with Steve Jobs as self-appointed Flash basher-in-Chief. The OSNews crowd, that is, dyed-in-the-wool technologists have, by and large, not been big fans of Flash, with its spotty availability and performance on alternative platforms, resource hogging, and instability. And though it’s quite useful for web video and other specialized interfaces, it drives the tech savvy crazy when it’s used for utterly superfluous multimedia bling. So we’ve had a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Flash, and whether device users should be free to make their own decision about whether it’s worthy to install on their iPads. But we’re leaving out an important detail. As Daniel Eran Dilger, a Flash developer, points out, almost all the important existing Flash infrastructure won’t work anyway.Update: A worthwhile rebuttal to this point of view.The article is a good read, and when you read it, you’ll do a facepalm. Pretty much anything important that uses Flash, from video players to games to Rich Internet Applications to silly UI elements depends on totally mouse-centric input cues. It’s important for Flash interfaces to know where the mouse cursor is, whether you’re clicking there or not. Touchscreens have no such data. There’s no way to know whether your finger is hovering above the screen. Of course, there’s no reason why new conventions can’t be established and Flash interfaces couldn’t be adapted to be aware of touchscreen-specific elements. But that would require all of the web’s Flash infrastructure to be re-written. If you’re going to do that anyway, why don’t we just focus our energies on HTML5 and leave Flash in the dustbin of history. Well, in essence that’s Steve Jobs’ position, and now it’s mine.

What’ s interesting is that Steve hasn’t brought up this issue himself. Instead, he’s trying to fight this battle with a combination of some kind of techno morality mixed with semi-unconvincing performance and stability gripes. While including Flash on the iPhone would eliminate the infamous blue lego icon, and the video players and the fancy buttons and the games would all appear on the screen, none of them would work. Some would kind of work, and others wouldn’t work at all, and overall, it would be no kind of solution.

Personally, I take a pragmatic approach to issues like this. I have Flash installed on all of my desktop computers, and I can honestly say I use it every day, mostly for web video, but sometimes for RIA interfaces or games. Once this HTML5 video thing gets resolved, Flash will move from an essential tool to a moderately useful one. But I’m also a long-time iPhone user, and, thanks in large part to the YouTube app, I don’t miss Flash much. When I run across something I can’t view on the iPhone, I either set it aside until I’m at a proper computer, or I just skip it. Just like the early iMac users really missed their ADB and serial ports or floppy disks for a while, I’m sure some people would miss Flash if it went away, but of course after a few months went by, and the web world moved past Flash to the new thing, we’d all look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. Steve Jobs has always been willing to be the jerk who abandons “old” technology first, and he’s got a pretty good track record. Without him, it would have taken USB several extra years to catch on. I wouldn’t mind seeing Flash relegated to a specialty add-on for Rich Internet Apps like fancy reporting tools, and the world moving to real industry standards for everyday UI elements, including video playing. If anyone’s going to accelerate that process, it’s going to be Apple. Microsoft might have the clout, but they’re too obsessed with supplanting someone else’s proprietary non-standard with their own, so that’s unlikely to happen.

In this case, Steve Jobs is less likely to win this case with the Reality Distortion Field than with a big dose of Reality. And the reality is this: include Flash on touchscreen devices all you want: they won’t work anyway.

Of course, it’s all a little more complicated, with Adobe and other touchscreen device manufacturers playing up upcoming Flash features as part of their efforts to align themselves against Apple. Read the comments in the Roughlydrafted article for some thought-provoking debate. But my opinion is that while it may be very important for Adobe to remain relevant by keeping Flash in play, and it may be important for Apple’s device competitors to tout Flash as a competitive advantage, the harsh reality is that web developers will have to at least update if not re-write much of their Flash UI infrastructure, and it will be a long time before non-mouse-using device users will have a satisfactory Flash experience on most web sites. It’s a good opportunity for us to ditch Flash. We should seriously considering taking it.

You’re right about RoughlyDrafted. Everything appears very well-researched, and it usually is, but it’s totally unreliable. They will go to extreme lengths to twist and turn any fact just to make Apple look good. You never know what’s real and what isn’t.

RD doesn’t come off nearly as foolish as you do with that comment. I could say the same about Slashdot, and yet occasionally good and well-thought articles pop up their too. Read the content without letting your hate get in the way. Even the worst sites can have a gem in them.

Sorry, but part of being human is learning from past mistakes and reading RD was one of mine.

I will wait for Ars or some other proper site to tackle the issue if it really is one. RDs spindoctoring and biased nonsense does not deserve to be taken seriously even if they are right once every decade.

On topic: 99% of the flash content on the web people want is video and there is no reason why Flash for mobile shouldn’t be able to play almost all of it.

While i hate flash as much as the next developer ( and i really do ), the author of that post may not have used a mobile device with flash on it. It works, and it works well. The HTC android phones like the Hero and Tattoo have flash already in browser, and it’s barely noticeable. Fair enough, you’re not going to be flash gaming much with them, but thats a game design issue or a flash app design issue, not an issue with the platform. It just means that flash developers are going to need to make better apps that work for touch screens. The platform works great, now it’s the devs’ turns. The ads are fully functional, galleries are fine and the movies work perfectly, so clearly flash is far from flawed on a touch screen device.

Furthermore, the iPad doesn’t suffer from the same issue that mobiles have with flash, which is hardware specs. Small screen and slow processor could be a problem, but that’s not really on a iPad.

My biggest worry is whether Apple will give Safari mobile and have you rendering crappy mobile pages at 1024×768 or have you using an in between version, which renders full size pages, which more often than not ( sadly ) use flash.

Wasn’t that the point? Flash itself may work but a lot of the UIs will need updating. I’m on the “let’s get rid of Flash while we’ve got the chance” side of this whole thing for other reasons, namely that it’s an accessibility nightmare largely for the same reason most Flash UIs are not ready for touch devices. The UIs are so mouse oriented that they’re useless from the keyboard when, and it’s very rare, you can actually get to the bloody controls with the keyboard in the first place.

My biggest worry is whether Apple will give Safari mobile and have you rendering crappy mobile pages at 1024×768 or have you using an in between version, which renders full size pages, which more often than not ( sadly ) use flash.

Drifting a little off topic, but if you get served up mobile pages when you don’t want them then it is the site (not Apple) that is at fault for taking notice of the user agent string and playing games. I usually hate being redirected to mobile sites on my iPhone. I want the normal standard site thank you very much.

As mentioned on other corners of the interwebs, roughlydrafted is nothing but a big pile of mac fanboy. His Reality Distortion Field is almost as large as Steves…

Anyway, this whole discussion is pointless. There are many other cellphones that can do Flash very well. There are even some “cheap” phones that do Flash (although some can only do Flash Lite). The mouse hover “problem” is actually present in plain HTML pages too. You dont see Steve kicking out Safari for that, do you?

Steve Jobs have no business dictating “good” technologies on me, period. If Flash is bad, it will die out. If the HTML5 vaporware ever gets here and its better, it will eventually kill Flash.

One tiny correction to the article: Apple excluding floppies did not promote USB. At that point, computers already included USB ports, Apple excluded floppies to save money. Crediting Apple for random events in history just makes you look like a typical fanyboy, please don’t do it.

EDIT: I am not a big fan of Flash, but things have gotten much better in the recent years. It is by no means the mess that apple apologist claim it is.

All I say is this: The exact same problem exists for all Browser based apps that only use HTML+CSS+JavaScript. But somehow Apple managed to make a lot of these mouse over navigation menues work on the iPhone OS. I absolutely don’t see why Adobe can’t come up with a similar approach to tackle the mouse over problem.

I said that the mouseover problem exists on touch devices in general but mentioned that Apple found a solution to that. Which you agreed to, right? And then I asked, why Adobe can’t do similar things. Did I miss something?

As said before, flash is comming to the android platform. I don’t see where the mouse over thing can be a serious problem on these devices : they all have a clickable trackball (even optical for some htc models). These should certainly be able to emulate a mouse with little efforts.

The RD article states that touchscreens are the problem. Is it just apple’s design (a single button to help the touchscreen) the real problem here?

They just forgot to say that it is not realy a flash-on-mobile but just a flash-apple-mobile-devices question…

All your points besides 3. don’t really matter. Knowing RD and the internet the guy could be a dog. And “existing flash content” people care about is mostly web video and that seems to work fine on other touch based mobile devices.

I agree that open and free standards are way better than flash and that Flash has to die and before that improve, but I don’t like it when people with an agenda disguise some twisted biased world view as some kind of objective reporting and that is what RD does.

Yes, but then thatâ€™s a different article to this one. Letâ€™s focus on reality.

He didnâ€™t claim to be an HTML5 developer. HTML5 is mentioned just once:

Fortunately, those unique Flash applications are 1) in the minority, 2) may be largely duplicable with HTML5 canvas, 3) ported to iPad using Adobeâ€™s Packager for iPhone, or 4) rewritten from the ground up as native apps. The most common uses of Flash on the webâ€”video, ads, and relatively simple menusâ€”can be done in JavaScript and H.264 video.

I donâ€™t see an ounce of bias there. Opinion, maybe, but thatâ€™s not unexpected.

Honestly, Iâ€™ve written far worse. I donâ€™t admit to being unbiased. I code HTML5, HTML5 is the future in my opinion and one day Flash may be irrelevant and unnecessary as RealPlayer is now.

What I meant was that RD will adapt its opinions, arguments, and everything else to bring it in line with Apple’s. If Apple were to add Flash to the iPhone tomorrow, and remove all HTML5 stuff from Safari, we’d see an article the day after tomorrow by the exact same writer, explaining in great detail why the move is a good one, and why Apple is right.

That’s why RD is simply not a source I link to in any way. Of course, others are free to.

Remember way back when iPhone did not have a SDK and relied on web content? When the same Apple apologists tried to convince everyone that the web was the future and a native programs were the root of all evil?

He never said you couldn’t; he said that most existing flash sites don’t. The entire point is if things need to be reimplemented anyway to take into account the lack of a mouse pointer, then why not reimplement in HTML+CSS+JavaScript?

Being a programmer myself for years, I highly doubt it’s that difficult to make existing apps compatible with both traditional mouse input and new touch devices. It’s centainly WAY easier and faster to just modify the existing Flash apps than reimplementing everything with totally different technology that isn’t even ready yet and lacks good tools to create.

What I have seen so far from the early versions of Flash Player for Android and webOS looks pretty solid. Sure, there will be things that don’t work. But an awful lot of stuff will work and work with Flash only. I’ve got an iPod touch and missed Flash several times, already.

If mobile device manufacturers could be bothered to include proper d-pads or trackballs on their devices, not only they’d make one-hand navigation much easier, but mouse emulation for Flash content would be possible.

Apple didn’t exclude a floppy drive from the iMac because they wanted to “save money”.

Few Mac users were using floppy disks anymore. On the Mac, Zip disks were rapidly becoming the norm with their 100 meg capacity. Let’s face it, when you’ve got a 100 meg pocket-sized disk, what use do you have for a 1.4 meg pocket-sized disk?

Apple didn’t want to push USB anyway, they wanted Firewire; but they needed USB for interoperability so Mac-compatible peripherals were easier to buy.

There is also the problem that floppy disks have horrible shelf life while surprisinly enough, zip disks were nearly indestructible. Thankfully, not long after bioses started having the ability to boot zip disks and usb boot soon after that.

The point here is that apple is not going to allow users to view flash content. They wont even let consumers decide whether or not to. The reasons stated seem pretty much like excuses and dont matter since apple has control of the platform and has decided for their users already. Just go deal with it and get a palm pre or android phone. People I know with a palm pre absolutely love the platform.

I just don’t understand all this ruckus. Yes, Flash is a horrible performance hog and should die a fiery death.

But claiming that it won’t work on touchscreen devices? Pfft. Most Flash animations will work just fine as the system can just pass the point where the user tapped on as a mouse cursor vector and a button click. Sure, you won’t be able to see tooltips or such, but for example video playback solutions like Youtube et al are clear enough that you won’t need tooltips anyway. Then, you could also do a mouse emulation mode: you move the cursor on the screen by moving mouse on it, and double-tapping would simulate a key click: POOF, all your Flash applications will work just as they did before.

No, I do understand the wish to get away from Flash as fast as possible, but inventing artificial problems when they are completely solvable isn’t the way to do it.

It’s a good opportunity for us to ditch Flash. We should seriously considering taking it.

I don’t know what opportunity this article talks about. I agree Flash is a plague. It is not accessible, it is not secure and not free. And I’ve ditched it years ago (never used it actually), but what is the special opportunity? That Steve Jobs said it sucks? To be fair, the iPad and the iPhone suck to. Lack of multiprocessing, lack of accessibility and closeness. There I said it. Now there is a new opportunity to ditch the iThings too while we are at it.

I thought OSNews readers would be smarter than this. Day 1 that the iPhone launched, Javascript had ZERO touch events. How would the millions of pages on the internet that relied on a mouse cursor work? Surely the whole internet would be non-functional and need to be rewritten!

Well of course not. Apple just translated touch events into existing mouse events.

On this demo the game also seems to work fine using the touch screen. When he goes to the National Geographic page I now wish he had actually navigated the site using the Flash menu that had the scrolling images.

The site admins seem to hate Flash above everything else at the moment. I understand their push for HTML5, open standards makes life better for web users and developers.

The Steve Jobs rant was pointless though. A CEO bitching about a rival company’s product. Steve was making the right arguments (I am still skeptical about Flash 10.1 draining battery life) for the wrong reasons. Steve Jobs wants the iPod/iPad base to buy video, games, and music from iTunes. It makes perfect sense for him to want that and I don’t fault him for it, it’s his job to make sure that Apple is profitable.

Flash should be phased out in my opinion, however I don’t quite think HTML5 is quite ready to take over. One big hurdle is Internet Explorer. Love it or hate it and no matter how much a % share Firefox or WebKit has IE still has a very large user base. I don’t see sites jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon yet until they’re sure to still retain that market.

The site admins seem to hate Flash above everything else at the moment. I understand their push for HTML5, open standards makes life better for web users and developers.

There is a reason to hate Flash – because it doesn’t perform. If Adobe actually fixed the bloody faults with the plugin – guess what, no one would give a crap about it, there would be next to no discussion apart from the Stallmanites sitting on the fringes of this forum. Does Flash perform well on Windows (Internet Explorer and ActiveX plugin)? sure, I’ve run it and it runs wonderfully but as soon as you start running it on non-Windows platforms then the quality nose dives. Flash on Mac OS X is a complete joke – Steve Jobs may resort to hyperbole when it comes to crashes but he is on the right rack. On Mac OS X, Flash is horribly unreliable and it has nothing to do with Adobe not having access to hardware and everything to do with the fact that they simply don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Fix the damn plugin and you’ll find the complaints about Flash would go away over night. That is the only reason I hate Flash; because of the crap performance, its ability to crash a browser and its memory, battery and CPU hogging qualities – nothing ideological, just a practical reality of having a technology that sucks and the software vendor who makes it (Adobe) refusing to even acknowledge the fault let alone taking it upon themselves to fix the damn problem.

And it’s inaccessible and Adobe, like with everything else, doesn’t give a damn. I’ve written to them before about it and have actually been derided openly for raising the issue, essentially being told that while Macromedia might have worked at it, Adobe doesn’t give a f*** and won’t ever give a f***. That’s why I hate Flash and, even if the OS X performance issues were fixed, I’d still hate it because any web site that uses Flash for more than content playback is about as unusable for me as a page can get. Add to that an alternate Flash plugin can never be developed completely, given that some of the spec still isn’t released, and I have plenty of reasons to find Flash the bane of my browsing experience.

well it is fun to be out of context. Multitask on a laptop/desktop is a whole different world then trying to run linux apps on device that is not on the market yet.

It is not that I think you can’t multitask. I prefer the getting things done effect of staying focused and finishing products. Multitask is such a buzz word of course the thing will multi task, but if you have a Video running in full screen I do not see the need or the interface or even the pixel space to run a spreadsheet. Multitask in this sense is an artifact(sic) of desktop thinking. It is the idea that i will be copying from one app to another or needing to do two and three layer inter application communication and multiple document editing. MOREOVER that artifact of though also implies a filesystem. And then a filesystem browser what level of this is exposed to the client apps? What level of (lower level) services will be exposed to these apps and what if an (backgrounded) app crashes while you are on an interface that has no mouse

The unit is a gadget or a appliance or a toy, I spent 2 hours (daily total)

on a train, and I do not think that I will buy one or use it. It would be silly for me to get it to take notes or write code. I would feel like a tool with all that power just idling while I dork out in vim, OTOH would I give it to my mother to stream movies and do light email? Do I expect that when I get one it will be not about what it can’t do like flash and mouse dependent interfaces or will it be for what it CAN do. Or what it is designed to do.

lots of embedded systems… ok, a few embedded systems, have flash and do not need a mouse. QNX supports flash as a touch screen option: “The new QNX Flash player has been optimized for low system overhead and optimal memory usage. It supports touch screens, mice, keypads, and other input models, as well as local font rendering for fast display generation.” http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2609_1.html

and that was in 2007, now they are on flash lite 3.1 with even better touch support.

that last one is more of an in progress but you get the point. Flash has little holding it back aside from Jobs on the iPad, this coming from someone who who has been using flash on his various embeded OS’s for the better part of 2 1/2 years.

I also hate Flash, and I’ve had the misfortune to try to develop stuff using it. Not cool.

I agree with the article that if Flash disappeared it wouldn’t be that big a deal, but I would miss the games. There really isn’t anything out there at the moment that could fill that void. I’ve seen some stuff using JQuery, but it’s not really a substitue for Flash.

Until someone comes up with a replacement for the games niche, I think Flash will stick around. Damn.

I think Flash is fine for games, what we need is just less use of Flash where itâ€™s not needed and where other content delivery mechanisms suffice. Itâ€™s going to be another two years before HTML5â€™s video capability begins to pan out. Everything weâ€™re discussing now is still very much the bleeding edge, since IE doesnâ€™t yet support HTML5 well. When IE9 comes, then this debate will arise again.

It is not because I am rabidly Mac ( I cut my teeth in Codewarrior andMPW) but because I spend a chunk of time in my debugger and also tutor youth in how to program. This is just a context, the real rub is when I explain that I am programmer people automatically assume *web* or Flash, and I _DO_ consider that to be real programming, just different. It is just that even the simplest task in C/ObjC/Cocoa can take days or seeks and in flash it might take a day. Think about a game like choplifter or lunar lander or asteroids. I wrote each of these in a week. I do not want to revisit ANY of my 2001/2002 code.

OTOH I like the idea of HTML5/CSS and

When I was young the web was different and you needed a plug in b/c windows could not handle a .mov/.mpg/.flv/.rp But now the OS can should we now invent NEW incompatibilities to patch when we have the chance to teach a new generation to get it right on the first build?

The world I _live_ in is vitally different than the world I work in And I sure as hell will not teach my kids hell (enterprise) when I can teach them heaven (userspace)

Almost all of the corporate apps that I bang on are fixinign the bugs that someone else offshore introduced to fix the other bugs of another offshore programmer. And this story speaks well to the facts that many of these flash programmers were ‘double-Sub-Contractors’ that are long gone and the APP still makes money And if you ask me and/or pay me in gold+strippers+vacation time I will not fix that spaghetti furball of code

Who targest both desktop and mobile – I have NEVER heard such a load of malarkey when it comes to handheld. I have ZERO issues with SDL’s mouse input reading the touchscreen of an iPhone, or any other handheld; AND the tilt sensor usually recognizes as a joystick input. There’s ZERO reason that a flash implementation targeting those devices could not be similarly implemented.

This recent glut of people running their mouths about **** they don’t understand – and then having it end up as a article on a news site is getting a little tired…

I live without flash player on all of my computers for a while now. And I can tell that I don’t miss it much – the inconvenience of not having YouTube-like players working is compensated with a great choice of downloaders, while the overall experience of internet usage is uncomparatively better without flash strain.